All this talk about skin “hearing” music, “feeling” the vibrations of the music etc raises for me a separate debate.

Whilst I completely agree that ABX is an excellent tool for spotting consciously detectable differences (ie respondents must be wilfully aware of the difference to make their choice) what about our unconscious decisioning? Just the other day their was a BBC documentary “out of control” which they were explaining how your unconscious mind is often calling the shots and influencing the decisions you make.

So we have 3 different types of tests:1) Signal waveform analysis (as was used to check to see if JPlay was doing anything or FLAC v WAV using Audio DiffMaker2) ABX audio testing (man in the middle) for checking for conscious discrimination of different samples3) Enjoyment factor (or some other form of what some philosophers call qualia)

I am not saying to know that our skin reacts to sound or anything like that however I can believe that there is more to our enjoyment of music than just what our ears hear, for example I was at a classical concert yesterday and we slipped from the back to some seats in the front where we could feel the power of the music more in our bellies. Is this just due to the increased volume and would our ears have provided our brains with sufficient information if I had desensitised my stomach – I am not so sure. Now clearly in this example I was conscious of this effect, but there may be others I was not and yet still added to my overall enjoyment.

So even assuming that enjoyment is a wholly conscious act there could be unconscious inputs that the brain turns into conscious states. However these states could be impacted by the ABX test in 2 ways:A. Not enough time is allowed for in playing the samples for these unconscious inputs to take effectB. The act of enjoying a concert vs the act of trying to spot differences mean the brain is trying to do different things and thus doing the second might not require the same inputs as used in the first (I assume we are happy that the outputs of those 2 exercises are likely to be different and in a different form

Now bear in mind that for this thread I am in the 16/44 is sufficient for playback camp – I am still saying I am not fully satisfied that tests (1) and (2) are sufficient to provide complete proof. It is a bit like evolution (as some other poster mentioned). There is some proof for the theory, there are many wholes (for example in the fossil line) however there is no proof for any other theory...